It’s a bit early-adopter as apart from the gimmick the pictures aren’t actually that great. But imagine this is in a very good camera with lots of megapixels. Imagine lots of dynamic range so you don’t have to worry about focus or exposure … Imagine so many pixels that you can even zoom after the picture is taken …

12 comments to Amazing new camera that focuses afterwards

I first saw news of the Lytro a few months ago; would love to have a play with one :-).

The flat lens is interesting; I know other researchers spent some time working on holographic lenses (a standing-wave hologram of a glass lens is a flat lens, when you think about it), as these lenses are not only flat, but flexible and have interesting properties for mass-production (make a large sheet, chop it up). Did this research direction hit a block, I wonder?

One way I think the Lytro might work is by having some sort of mask or lens array in front of a normal sensor. If the Lytro used a sensor like the one in the Nokia 808 Pureview (a 41 megapixel sensor which makes for a very interesting camera in an otherwise not great phone), that might increase its performance.

I do rather like the idea of adjusting focus, exposure and composition after the image is captured. You can already do a bit of the last two by taking RAW pictures and using a large sensor like on a full frame DSLR or medium format camera.

Focus is another trick. Also the Lytro people are promising new features in software like 3D and being able to move the perspective around.

I think the best use for this camera would be for creating those lovely massive-depth-of-field shots. Of course they’d have to create software to take the sharpest details from each layer, but there are already programs out there that are not bad at that sort of thing.

Lens aberrations are not as beastly as they once were either, especially as you can now correct a lot of them in software such as Photoshop.

Andrew, you’re not completely correct. The information has been spread out by convolution with another function (gaussian is the one often used to blur in software but it’s something not dissimilar for a lens). This can be rectified by deconvolution which typically involves Fourier Transforms. With modern processing power, this is probably coming within reach (though they may be using another technique).

Some information *is* lost but there’s definitely some scope for sharpening. Though I’m not necessarily convinced this particular camera isn’t just a gimmick. I recall reading a while back of an algorithm that could do multiple tricks with fractal processing, in effect, creating information which isn’t there. More details will need to be forthcoming.

IIRC from seeing this tech previously, the sensor is not flat but 3D, which is how the device manages to capture the focus points at different depths. The sharpness is not interpolated but captured as is, albeit with a reduced resolution.

This really does work — no information is “created” out of thin air. It works by having many lenses in an array. Behind each lens is a number of sensor pixels. Focusing is a matter of deciding which pixel to use from each lens. It’s called a plenoptic camera and is a real thing. This is just the first one available to consumers.

Who Are We?

The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.